IDC NZ unveils top IT predictions for 2018 - and beyond

‘Kiwi firms must act now like a digital native by investing beyond 3rd platform technologies’

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Many NZ organisations are advancing to the next stage of digital evolution - becoming a true digital native.

Louise Francis, IDC NZ

"With 3rd platform technologies (cloud, mobility, big data and social) now deeply embedded into New Zealand organisations, CIOs and digital leadership teams are now ramping up investment in the digital economy opportunity", says Louise Francis, senior research manager, IDC New Zealand.

“Digital natives are here and companies must now act like a digital native by investing beyond 3rd platform technologies. It is no longer about piecemeal investment but largescale investment taking advantage of the foundations that have been laid down over the past five years,” says Francis.

Francis issues this guidance in the light of IDC New Zealand’s latest FutureScapes report, which tracks the top 10 IT predictions for 2018 and beyond.

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This year's predictions reflect the maturity and growth of New Zealand's digital economy, with many organisations accustomed to leveraging powerful digital innovation platforms. Over the next two years IDC expect this will manifest itself in expanding digital developer communities, open innovation ecosystems, hyper-agile application deployment technologies and a much more diverse cloud services world.

This year's predictions, in no particular order, are:

Digital transformation (DX) economy tipping point

By 2021, at least 50 per cent of New Zealand’s GDP will be digitised, with growth in every industry driven by digitally enhanced offerings, operations, and relationships; by 2020, investors will use platform, data value, and customer engagement metrics as valuation factors for all enterprises.

The rise of DX platforms

By 2020, 60 per cent of all NZ enterprises will have fully articulated an organisation-wide digital transformation (DX) platform strategy, and will be in the process of implementing that strategy as the new IT core for competing in the digital economy.

Cloud 2.0 - distributed and specialised

By 2021, enterprises' spending on cloud services and cloud-enabling hardware, software, and services will more than double to over NZ$2.6 billion, leveraging the diversifying cloud environment that is 20 per cent at the edge, over 15 per cent specialised compute (non-X86 compute including GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and quantum computers), and over 85 per cent multicloud.

AI everywhere

By 2019, 40 per cent of digital transformation initiatives will use AI services; by 2021, 75 per cent of commercial enterprise apps will use AI, over 75 per cent of consumers will interact with customer support bots, and over 50 per cent of new industrial robots will leverage AI.

Everyone’s a data provider

By 2020, 75 per cent of large enterprises will generate revenue from data as a service — from the sale of raw data, derived metrics, insights, and recommendations — up from nearly 30 per cent in 2017.

Everyone’s a developer

Improvements in simple, "Low Code/No Code", development tools will dramatically expand the number of nontech developers over the next 36 months. By 2021, these nontraditional developers will build 15 per cent of business applications and 25 per cent of new application features.

Hyper-agile apps

By 2021, enterprise apps will shift toward hyper-agile architectures, with 90 per cent of application development on cloud platforms (PaaS) using microservices and cloud functions (e.g., AWS Lambda and Azure Functions) and over 95 per cent of new microservices deployed in containers (e.g., Docker).

By 2020, 75 per cent of large enterprises will generate revenue from data as a service — from the sale of raw data, derived metrics, insights, and recommendations

Louise Francis, IDC NZ

Human digital interfaces

By 2020, human-digital interfaces will diversify, as 20 per cent of field service techs and 20 per cent of info workers use augmented reality, nearly 30 per cent of new mobile apps use voice as a primary interface, and nearly 40 per cent of the consumer-facing NZX50 use biometric sensors to personalise experiences.

Blockchain and digital trust

By 2021, at least 25 per cent of the NZX organisations will use blockchain services as a foundation for digital trust at scale.

Open API ecosystem

By 2021, more than half of the NZX companies will see an average of one-third of their digital services interactions come through their open API ecosystems, up from virtually 0 per cent in 2017 — amplifying their digital reach far beyond their own customer interactions.

"Many New Zealand organisations have already reached a level of technological maturity to advance to the next stage of digital evolution, becoming a true digital native. The only things that can hold them back will be an innovation impasse caused by legacy systems constraining transformation and a lack of business vision," says Francis.

"However, 2018 will provide the opportunity for all organisations to unleash digital innovation's power for digital-centric transformation altering business and society at scale,” she concludes.